60 pages • 2-hour read
How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir
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Chapters 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use, addiction, disordered eating, illness, mental illness, and death.
Chapter 8 Summary
Jong-Fast explores the physical and emotional toll of caring for aging parents while simultaneously confronting her husband Matt’s terminal cancer diagnosis. The chapter opens with Jong-Fast observing the early signs of her own aging, including dark circles under her eyes that appeared around the time of Matt’s diagnosis. She reflects on how aging happens gradually and then suddenly, comparing the body’s deterioration to an unraveling sweater.
The narrative centers on Jong-Fast’s struggle to manage her mother’s declining mental health and addiction. Her mother, now living in a nursing home with Ken, suffered from severe dementia exacerbated by decades of alcohol and substance addiction. When her mother required an MRI, she became agitated and childlike, insisting that her brain was fine and that it didn’t need examination. Jong-Fast notes how she now speaks to her mother as if addressing a child, highlighting the role reversal that has occurred.
Jong-Fast provides extensive background on her mother’s lifelong substance addictions, particularly to diet pills and alcohol. She recounts traumatic childhood experiences, including sessions with a celebrity therapist named Mildred Newman who encouraged Jong-Fast as a child to confront her mother about her substance use. These interventions proved futile, as her mother would promise to stop but never follow through. Jong-Fast describes dangerous incidents from her youth, including her mother driving while intoxicated and causing accidents, which made her realize her mother posed a genuine threat to others.
The chapter details her mother’s pattern of public humiliation through drunken speeches at family events and social gatherings. Jong-Fast became skilled at apologizing for her mother’s behavior and developed strategies to avoid these embarrassing situations. She describes particularly mortifying incidents, including a toast where her mother made inappropriate sexual comments about family friends, which temporarily motivated a brief period of sobriety.
These childhood experiences with an unreliable, narcissistic parent shaped Jong-Fast’s adult relationships. She explains how she developed emotional walls that stop her from forming deep connections with others, with the exception of her own children. This defense mechanism emerged from growing up with a mother who was physically present but emotionally unavailable, despite constantly professing her love.
The chapter concludes with an incident in which Jong-Fast visited her parents in the nursing home, bringing her son and dog as emotional buffers. She grappled with guilt over dismantling their previous life while wearing her mother’s ring, which she took without permission. When her mother noticed the ring and asked if she had given it to her, Jong-Fast quickly removed it. She was confronted with the reality that she took something that wasn’t freely given, symbolizing the complex dynamics of obligation and resentment in their relationship.
Chapter 9 Summary
This chapter centers on Jong-Fast’s experience navigating Matt’s metastatic cancer diagnosis, her parents’ decline in a nursing home, and her father-in-law’s death. The narrative explores how these overlapping losses trigger both depression and memories of her troubled childhood.
Jong-Fast describes living in what she terms “Metastatic World,” characterized by constant medical scans that would determine whether Matt’s treatments were working. Matt’s slow-moving cancer meant years of uncertainty rather than a quick resolution. The author experienced severe depression, manifesting as an inability to eat (what she calls the “grief diet”) and sleeping excessively to avoid consciousness. She reflects on her history with disordered eating, including addiction to diet pills as a teenager and later exercise bulimia, where she would alternate between intense workouts and overeating.
The chapter weaves together present medical crises with childhood memories, particularly focusing on Jong-Fast’s relationship with her famous grandfather, Howard Fast. Fast was a writer and member of the Communist Party who spent time in prison after appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era. Jong-Fast recalls bringing Matt to meet her grandfather, describing Fast as someone fascinating to strangers but a self-absorbed bore to family members. She explores the burden of being raised by narcissistic, fame-obsessed relatives who treated children as accessories rather than individuals requiring genuine care.
The author describes her mother’s former glamour and pretensions, contrasting these memories with her current state of confusion and decline. She examines the isolation of being an only child responsible for making all decisions about her parents’ care.
The chapter culminates with the death of Matt’s father, Stu, at age 91. Despite his advanced age, Jong-Fast presents this death as devastating, particularly for her son, who lost his closest companion. She reflects on her inability to deliver a eulogy, seeing this as evidence that she remains fundamentally unchanged despite efforts at personal growth.
Throughout these events, Jong-Fast grappled with questions about mortality, time, and whether she wasted her youth. She struggled with the mundane aspects of daily life, finding herself disconnected from normal concerns. The chapter concludes at Stu’s burial, which took place adjacent to her grandfather’s unmarked grave, symbolizing both family continuity and the ultimate insignificance of fame when confronted with death.
Chapter 10 Summary
This chapter chronicles Jong-Fast’s experience accompanying her mother to speak at Erica’s Barnard College 60th reunion, which was followed by a reflective trip to Venice that forced the author to confront her troubled childhood.
The chapter opens with Jong-Fast reluctantly agreeing to allow Erica to give a speech at the Barnard reunion. Despite Jong-Fast’s explanations about her mother’s dementia, the well-meaning reunion organizers insisted that a skilled moderator could manage the situation. Jong-Fast uses this interaction to illustrate how fame creates unrealistic expectations, as people struggle to accept that celebrities remain subject to human limitations like illness and aging.
The reunion event itself became a study in the peculiar power of celebrity. Jong-Fast describes her anxiety as she accompanied her confused mother to the stage, prepared to intervene if necessary. However, the audience responded enthusiastically to Erica’s empty platitudes about courage and bravery, demonstrating how fame can make even diminished performances seem compelling. The author reflects on how audiences enjoy watching famous people regardless of their actual capacity to perform meaningfully.
Following this emotionally draining experience, Jong-Fast traveled to Venice with her son, seeking to process her complicated childhood relationship with the city. She explains that Venice holds traumatic associations because her mother conducted an affair there with a married Italian man whose wife remained unaware of the relationship. As a child, Jong-Fast was frequently brought along on these trips, staying in uncomfortable accommodations filled with rats while her mother pursued her romantic interests.
Jong-Fast also reveals a pattern of maternal neglect as she recounts an incident from her teenage years when a family friend made inappropriate advances toward her during a trip to Tuscany. When she asked her mother for protection, Erica, who was intoxicated, dismissed her concerns and failed to intervene, forcing the young girl to realize she would need to protect herself.
Jong-Fast presents Venice as a symbol of her inability to escape her traumatic childhood. She describes herself as a “military reenactor” of her own upbringing, repeatedly returning to painful places and memories in an attempt to resolve them. However, during this trip, she experienced a moment of clarity, recognizing that her efforts to make peace with the past had been futile.
The chapter concludes with Jong-Fast’s realization that she has been “inviting demons to brunch” rather than confronting them directly (193). She acknowledges that, unlike people with happy childhoods, who can nostalgically revisit their past, those with traumatic upbringings remain trapped in cycles of attempted resolution. This epiphany led to her decision to leave Venice early, accepting that some battles cannot be won and that moving forward requires abandoning the hope of retroactively fixing childhood wounds.
Chapters 8-10 Analysis
In chapters 8 through 10, Jong-Fast chronicles the simultaneous deterioration of her husband Matt’s health and her mother’s cognitive decline, creating a narrative that examines how individuals cope with loss and mortality. Jong-Fast uses a confessional writing style that alternates between moments of dark humor and raw vulnerability, constructing a narrative voice that refuses to romanticize either her childhood trauma or her current struggles. The chapters operate as interconnected vignettes that build toward an understanding of how fame, addiction, and emotional neglect create generational patterns of damage.
The theme of The Dangers of Unhealthy Defense Mechanisms runs throughout these chapters as Jong-Fast documents her various attempts to avoid confronting the painful realities of her life at that time. The author describes her strategy of going to sleep not from exhaustion but as a means of avoiding consciousness: “I don’t go to sleep because I’m tired, or even because I particularly want to go to sleep, but instead because I just don’t want to be awake” (157). This pattern of avoidance extends to her physical responses to stress, including her inability to eat and her tendency to disconnect from ordinary activities. Jong-Fast presents these dissociative episodes as survival mechanisms developed during a childhood marked by unpredictability and neglect. The author’s decision to travel to Venice while her husband underwent cancer treatment represents another form of escapism, as she attempted to resolve childhood trauma through geographical displacement and the repetition of past experiences.
The theme of The Corrosive Effects of Fame emerges through Jong-Fast’s examination of how celebrity status distorts normal human relationships and expectations. The author illustrates this through the Barnard reunion incident, where well-meaning organizers refused to accept that Erica Jong’s dementia disqualified her from public speaking, demonstrating how “non-famous people often can’t accept that the rules of human existence still actually apply to famous people” (180). Jong-Fast reveals how fame creates a dehumanizing effect, transforming individuals into commodities or accessories rather than complete people. Through these examples, Jong-Fast argues that fame operates as a form of social currency that ultimately impoverishes authentic human connection and moral responsibility, dovetailing with her earlier examination of how celebrity and fame stunted Erica’s personal life and relationships.
The theme of The Complexity of Loving an Emotionally Unavailable Parent forms the emotional core of these chapters as Jong-Fast navigates her feelings toward her declining mother. The author presents the paradox of caring for someone who never provided adequate care for her, describing how she simultaneously feels relief at placing her mother in a nursing home while experiencing guilt about her lack of traditional filial grief. Jong-Fast captures this complexity through her observation about her mother’s ring: “I was wearing my mother’s opal ring […] I wore it because I felt as if I should get something out of this deal where I took care of the parents who never took care of me” (195). The author’s struggle to understand her own emotional responses to the situation reflects the broader challenge of loving someone whose narcissism and addiction prevented them from forming genuine attachments. Jong-Fast presents this relationship as emblematic of how children of emotionally unavailable parents must learn to provide themselves with the nurturing they never received while still fulfilling obligations to those who failed them.
Jong-Fast uses a fragmented narrative structure that mirrors the dissociative states she describes experiencing during this time, moving between past and present without traditional transitional elements. This structural choice reinforces the memoir’s exploration of trauma and memory as the author’s consciousness shifts between immediate concerns about her husband’s cancer treatment and childhood recollections of neglect and inappropriate sexual attention. Her struggle to bring the disparate parts of her past and present together creates an underlying tension in these chapters that illustrates the tension she was grappling with at the time.
The author’s use of dark humor serves as both a coping mechanism and a rhetorical strategy, enabling her to address traumatic material while maintaining narrative momentum. Jong-Fast describes her mother’s alcohol addiction and her own disordered eating with a sardonic tone that acknowledges the sometimes absurd dysfunctional family dynamics without minimizing their impact. The memoir’s treatment of mortality creates a meditation on the relationship between death and meaning, as the author confronts the reality that her parents’ deaths will not provide the closure or resolution that popular psychology suggests.
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